Adieu, Manhattan; Bonjour, Bushwick

Florent Morellet Revels in a New Scene in Brooklyn

These days Florent Morellet prefers to be in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at clubs like Bossa Nova Civic Club.Credit
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Beams of light and fog bathed Florent Morellet in the middle of a crowded dance floor. He cut through the shadows, a compact figure waving his sweat-drenched arms and grinning in an epiphany.

“I’m the oldest one here,” he shouted over the pulsing beat after midnight one recent Thursday. “It’s fantastic!”

“Here” is the Bossa Nova Civic Club, a dance club and bar tucked under the El on Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn’s latest “it” neighborhood. Mr. Morellet is 60. About twice as old as his new neighbors and new friends.

But Mr. Morellet, a charming provocateur born French and upper-class, has never taken the conventional path. When he opened Florent, his boisterous diner-bistro in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, in 1985, the cobblestone streets were still inhabited by transgender prostitutes and truckers. He brought guidebook notoriety to a sketchy area and, dressing in drag and promoting political causes, made himself into an indelible New York personality.

Now, five years after skyrocketing rents forced him into early retirement, he has moved to Bushwick to reinvent himself. He does not yet know how. But he is sure it will not involve another restaurant.

“Florent happened because of a time of New York,” he said, meaning his restaurant, not his persona. “The neighborhood of that time, it’s gone. Here, there may very likely be, very possibly be, something in the hospitality business that we will stumble upon.”

It might be a bar, he said. Or perhaps a performance space. He moved only eight weeks ago. For now, he is getting involved in a nonprofit food organization, EcoStation:NY, for which he is planning a December fund-raiser.

“At the moment,” he said, “I just want to be in the neighborhood.”

He spends days scouting for new sneakers on Knickerbocker Avenue, watching the skateboarders in Maria Hernandez Park, buying stone crabs for $1.99 a pound at the Sea Town market on Linden Street and sampling fried pig’s ears and other Latin American street fare. Every experience is fresh for him.

“It’s amazing. I just cry. I cry almost every day,” he said, tears dripping through his laughter.

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The now-closed bistro Florent.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“I found the New York that I love,” he explained later. “It’s actually better than the one that I found when I came. It’s safer.”

He can, for now, afford to explore. He is living off his savings from his restaurant business, which he said grossed $3.5 million in its best years.

“I think it’s good for him right now,” said Denise Dalfo, 60, his closest friend and longtime manager of Florent. “It’s very charged, with all the young people making art, making restaurants, they are forwarding ideas. In his life, he loves this, he feeds on this energy.”

Other friends are wary, especially since they see Mr. Morellet’s move to Bushwick as a culmination of recent life crises. After a milestone birthday, he cut ties with his parents, split from his companion of seven years and then broke up with Manhattan, the only New York he had known since he arrived in 1978.

Kevin Malony, a director of the Manhattan theater company Tweed and a longtime friend, said they had a falling out after Mr. Malony worked for Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign. Mr. Morellet’s preferred candidate was Christine C. Quinn.

“I have a great love for him that will always remain,” Mr. Malony, 56, said, carefully prefacing his concern. “I think he is freaking out. I don’t know how to respond to him sometimes when he seems to think that everybody needs to move to Bushwick to hang out with 25-year-olds.”

Florent, the man and the brand, is a fabulous paradox. He was a restaurateur for whom food was, and still is, secondary to the scene.

He catered to after-hours clubgoers, celebrities and struggling artists. He made the restaurant his stage and his soapbox. He presided over Bastille Day parties as Marie Antoinette. He chartered and catered buses to gay rights marches in Washington. Florent the restaurant was a hub for AIDS activism, and Mr. Morellet was frank about his own HIV-positive status, posting T-cell counts on his daily specials board.

He outlived his husband, Daniel Platten, and many friends, and then, after 23 years, his restaurant. When the landlord asked for more rent than Mr. Morellet thought was viable — even though Mr. Morellet had offered to triple his rent to $18,000 — he and his partners said goodbye with a series of parties for each of the five Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief. He let go, he insisted, but others did not.

“On the island over there, people bug me,” he said about Manhattan. “They say to me, ‘Oh, my God, you were a genius, you had the greatest restaurant on the face of the earth.’ And the next sentence is, ‘Isn’t it terrible what they did to you?’ I’m like, ‘No, I think it’s great. I’m so glad. I’m so glad it’s over.’ ”

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Mr. Morellet at the Bossa Nova Civic Club.Credit
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

He rolls his eyes, saying, “I’m so sick of everyone in Manhattan complaining about the way things used to be.”

Did anybody ever tell him he complains an awful lot about complainers?

“All the time,” said his longtime friend Jerry Felix, laughing.

To flee the “Naturally Occurring Retirement Community” he sees as Manhattan, Mr. Morellet has taken refuge in what he calls the East Bank of New York. There, he is pleased to go unrecognized but seems to love being recognized even more.

A 6-foot-4 drag queen known as Merrie Cherry, who lives in Bushwick, said she had to watch David Sigal’s documentary “Florent: Queen of the Meat Market,” upon Mr. Morellet’s suggestion, to learn about him. Now they go out dancing together.

“The young people of this neighborhood, they don’t know,” Mr. Morellet said. “They didn’t lose Florent. And when they hear about my past, they’re like, ‘You’re so cool, you’re here!’ ”

All that remains of his past in the meatpacking district is his ghost and his plaster bust.

Three restaurants have opened and closed in Florent’s space at 69 Gansevoort Street since Mr. Morellet moved on. The newest owner, Michael Shah of DelShah Capital, paid $8.9 million in August. He would not comment on his plans.

Nearby on the High Line, off 14th Street, Mr. Morellet’s image looks out onto the crowds. This summer, he won the Vox Populi vote to be immortalized as part of a High Line sculpture exhibit called Busted, which reinterpreted traditional sculptures. The Bronx artist John Ahearn won the commission to create a bust of him.

They became instant friends and co-conspirators. One August day, Mr. Morellet lay on a table on the High Line as the plaster dried around his head. The sculpture of his plant-fringed head now hangs on a brick wall — Caravaggio meets Greek mythology meets Florent, “the French-American Princess,” as he calls himself.

“I love it,” he exclaimed at the unveiling in late September, and Mr. Ahearn exhaled. Mr. Morellet darted in and out of conversations, until he realized he was late for his own party, one in a series of farewell-to-Manhattan parties he held in his loft on Lafayette Street, in NoLIta.

He invited three 20-something artists who had been at the unveiling to come along, then herded everyone into his Subaru wagon. The radio played ’70s ballads.

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Florent Morellet with his friend Arthur van Schendel on the roof of his Troutman apartment building.Credit
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

One of the artists asked him why he was moving to Bushwick. “I met a young straight man, like you, charming, and he took me to Bossa Nova Civic Club, and I couldn’t stop dancing until they closed the doors,” Mr. Morellet said. “And I came back and back, with my bicycle. So the music and the dancing got me to Bushwick.”

Mr. Morellet has been showing Bushwick to friends and visitors, in adventures invariably including white wine, smoked herbs, gin and tonics (half ice) and Adderall for good measure. His attention has always skipped from rooftop to rooftop; now his plans seem to change daily.

“My life,” he said, “is unwrapping before my eyes.”

His home base is CastleBraid, a sleek, full-service rental building on Troutman Street marketed toward artists and art lovers. He finds it quaint that the elevator smells of marijuana at 3 p.m. In August, he came as a guest to a fund-raiser for Ms. Quinn’s mayoral campaign, his first visit to the building.

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“He was the firefly of the party,” said Leslie Whitaker, 36, a resident and an organizer of the event. “Everybody was taken with him.”

Mr. Morellet and his cockatoo, Koko, moved in on Sept. 4, to a top-floor, two-bedroom-plus-office apartment. The shared roof is an adult playground, decorated with sculptures made of old bicycles. The late-afternoon sun casts a vintage glow on the Midtown skyline; to the east, the Cypress Hills area of Brooklyn reminds him of San Francisco.

In his raspy, French-accented voice, Mr. Morellet extols the potential development of Newtown Creek’s waterfront (post-pollutants), analyzes North Brooklyn’s messed-up grid and pushes for more skyscrapers to accommodate the city’s growth. He moved to what he considered the most viable edge of Bushwick, but he sees the boundaries soon pushing farther east on the M and L lines. He considers the two dirtiest words in the English language to be “nostalgia” and “gentrification.” He especially hates “the g-word,” as he calls it — but only because neighborhoods fight it.

That’s what’s happening now in Bushwick. A plan to rezone nine square blocks for retail and high-rise apartments has upset longtime residents and the likely new councilman, Antonio Reynoso, 30. Artists met this summer to discuss whether it was better to join the development bandwagon or be swept away by it.

Mr. Morellet, who read about the meetings in a local blog, thought they belonged in the TV parody show “Portlandia.”

“Cities change,” he said. “Young people are going to be pioneers in neighborhoods and make them livable. Wealthy people are going to move in and young people are going to move to the next neighborhood, and the next neighborhood. We have tons of neighborhoods to rebuild. Yes, the prices are going up. That’s great.”

Average rents for one-bedroom apartments in Bushwick rose to $1,950 in 2013 from $1,535 in 2010, according to the real estate company aptsandlofts.com. Coffee places open faster than baristas can make soy lattes. Craft beer and wine bars put out chalkboard signs like pedigrees.

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Mr. Morellet, right, with his boyfriend, Monti Lawson.Credit
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Mominette, a nearly year-old bistro on Knickerbocker Street, has become Mr. Morellet’s new favorite spot. The garden is an oasis, the beef bourguignon comforting and the “Jazz and Absinthe Tuesdays” buzzing.

He wandered in one day and met one of the owners, Tim Bern, 30, a straight-talking musician from New Zealand. Another owner was an old friend — the pastry chef Jean Pierre Marquet, 58, with whom Mr. Morellet worked at La Gamelle, a SoHo restaurant, in the early ’80s.

Mr. Bern, knowing Mr. Morellet’s interest in activism, introduced him to Monti Lawson, 27, who works at EcoStation:NY. Quickly, that friendship turned romantic.

With Mr. Lawson as his guide, Mr. Morellet has visited EcoStation’s garden at the Bushwick Campus School, picking the microgreens, and shopped at the local Saturday farmers’ market.

In the meatpacking district, Mr. Morellet was a pioneer, and he worked hard to achieve landmark status for the area in 2003. He was a vocal member of Community Board 2. In moving to Bushwick, he is joining a party already in progress; why now?

“Because at 55, I wasn’t ready,” he said simply.

In the five years after Florent closed, Mr. Morellet looked into opening another restaurant and investing in a hotel, but ultimately he was not comfortable with corporate involvement.

He has long had a fascination with maps, making them and hanging them in his restaurant, and he threw himself into his art. He designed fantastical maps, based on real cities but layered with apocryphal realities. He exhibited in Paris and on the Lower East Side. Those works hang in his apartment, along with cutouts of old Brooklyn subway maps.

He enjoys conversations about social change, yet can be acerbic when he disagrees with someone. (Do not get him started on why he refuses to wear a bicycle helmet.) He said he did not care what people thought of him; in the next breath, he said he yearned to be the Pied Piper. “He is a particularly difficult person to categorize,” Mr. Malony said. “Which is why we all love him, and we all are like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Mr. Felix, who is helping Mr. Morellet settle in Bushwick, said he saw in him a “whole new vitality and enthusiasm.”

Perhaps his move has to do with his repudiation of his parents. His father, François, 87, is a famous conceptual artist in France; his mother, Danielle, 86, an all-knowing matriarch. “He always knew that he was so enmeshed in being part of the family, part of his father’s art enterprise,” Mr. Felix said. “He was an extension of that without accepting it.”

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Mr. Morellet with Leslie Whitaker, center, and Merrie Cherry on Myrtle Avenue.Credit
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

Mr. Morellet described his family’s closeness “as incestuous, short of the sex.” Even as he approached 60, his mother obsessed about his weight and interfered with his siblings’ lives, he said. This summer, Mr. Morellet flew to France to say he had had enough.

“This has been very, very liberating,” he said. “They thought at first that I should go to rehab, but I am anything but depressed.”

In 2002, Mr. Morellet fell into a deep depression. “I went into rehab, 12-stepping, group therapy, every kind of therapy,” he said. Food, alcohol, sex — he can name any number of addictions.

Friends say they see some of the same red flags now as before. But Mr. Morellet says he is happy in Brooklyn, and that should be enough.

In Bushwick, local proprietors are curious about his arrival and flattered when he visits. At the Rookery, a two-month-old pub in a converted warehouse on Troutman, the owner, Jamie Schmitz, 41, thinks Mr. Morellet will do “what he’s done everywhere he’s ever been — he’s helped transform neighborhoods.”

“Whether he opens with a restaurant or has a hand in the community board, or a garden or a park,” Mr. Schmitz said, “I’m sure whatever he does will be interesting. He doesn’t have to build the next 24-hour bistro in Bushwick.”

Near the Rookery, the newest trends seem to be barbecue joints and music venues. Mr. Schmitz says the area near the popular Roberta’s restaurant and the Morgan Avenue stop on the L train peaked long ago.

“It’s so damn cute, so wholesome,” he said. “I need to find a better word.”

The antidote to wholesome is at Bizarre, a local bar and lounge off Myrtle Avenue and another French-owned establishment. (Mr. Morellet is a Francophobe, but he makes exceptions.) A recent performance of the monthly burlesque show there was shockingly explicit.

“We did things like this in my restaurant, but, wow, this took it to a whole new level,” Mr. Morellet said.

Another night at Bizarre, his group watched simulated zombie sex. The music was too screeching though, so they left for the Bossa Nova.

That afternoon, returning from doctors’ appointments in Manhattan, Mr. Morellet experienced a first on the L train. A young man offered him a seat. Rather than be offended or sent into a spiral, Mr. Morellet was grateful. He was able to rest before a late night of dancing ahead.

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2013, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Adieu, Manhattan; Bonjour, Bushwick. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe